Towards integrated environmental model-based problem solving 2.0

Environmental problem solving requires that problem-solving resources such as tools, models, data and its documentation can easily discovered and seamlessly cooperate, even if they are distributed and originate from different disciplines. The main hurdles to take include problematic collaboration within multidisciplinary teams, finding appropriate resources, and gluing them to a single virtual specific problem-solver. The first hurdle can be lowered by making knowledge explicit by organizing knowledge related to the problem, to the problem solving process and to the problem-solving model in a repository of domain ontologies and metadata, which is structured in layers, ranging from generic to detailed and specific. A second hurdle can be lowered by developing a framework that enables finding appropriate resources and compose them to end-user applications with workflows that guide team members through the problem solving process. Such a framework implicates interoperability of the resources in a technical, syntactic and semantic sense. Semantic interoperability can be based on semantic annotation of the resources and organizing this annotated knowledge in a Repository of Domain Ontologies and Metadata.